Boarding Passes in Your Blackberry

As reported in Executive Travel Magazine this week:

Passengers traveling out of Salt Lake City on Delta, Northwest or Delta Connection can now use so-called paperless boarding passes, and Delta will expand the option this week to Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport as well. And American Airlines last week expanded its paperless boarding pass option to three more airports: Las Vegas, Atlanta and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Various airlines have introduced paperless boarding pass technology at a number of airports, in cooperation with the Transportation Security Administration. Passengers who want to use this option will need a Web-enabled mobile device; when they check in online, they can select to download their boarding pass to the device.

The boarding pass will show up on the screen of the device as a bar code-type pattern, which will be scanned at the airport by a TSA agent when the passenger’s ID is checked. The electronic boarding pass is also scanned at the gate prior to boarding.

The Downturn and the Caregiver

As addressed in George Moschis's essential book Baby Boomers and Their Parents, the role of the caregiver is an increasing critical part in the American family. Members of the Silent Generation are living longer than previous generations, but often face critical care needs as they collect an array of maladies associated with advanced aging.

The challenge of the family caregiver was highlighted in an article in yesterday's New York Times. Here are the quick takeaways.

The economic crisis has spread its pain widely, but it has placed special stresses on the estimated 44 million Americans who provide care for an elderly or disabled relative or spouse, many of whom have already made themselves financially vulnerable trying to balance work and family.

In a recent survey of 1,005 caregivers, one in six said they had lost a job during the downturn, and 21 percent said they had to share housing with family members to save money. The survey was conducted by the National Alliance for Caregiving and Evercare, a division of the UnitedHealth Group, which provides long-term health care.

Caregivers spend an average of $5,500 a year as part of their responsibilities, not counting lost wages, according to a 2007 survey by the National Alliance for Caregiving.

D-Day Remembered

I can think of no better perspective on D-Day than Ernie Pyle’s. Ernie was the original embedded correspondent and chronicled a personal side of America’s role in WW II that foreshadows much of modern war reporting.

Poking around the net today I was excited to find that Indiana University has an open archive of many of Ernie’s columns. Check out this column along with the two other D-Day columns on the site.

If you are a WW II buff I strongly recommend all three of Ernie’s original books, Brave Men in particular. It looks like there are several new collections of Ernie’s columns, but I saw several original editions of Brave Men on ebay for just a few dollars.